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Monday, December 16, 2013

It stinks! Art critic Julian Spalding was banned from Damien Hirst's Tate exhibition after calling him a talentless conman... but we smuggled him in - and here's his verdict

It stinks! Art critic Julian Spalding was banned
from Damien Hirst's Tate exhibition after calling him a talentless
conman... but we smuggled him in - and here's his verdict

By
Julian Spalding

There is no party more tantalising
than one you’re banned from. It was in that spirit that I joined the
100-strong throng outside the Tate Modern art gallery in London on
Thursday to see the Damien Hirst exhibition. But while my fellow queuers
were buzzing in anticipation of Hirst’s dots, pills and those dead
animals, I was just relieved I hadn’t been barred by the bouncers. That’s
exactly what happened when I tried to visit the exhibition earlier this
week with a BBC camera crew in tow. Dozens of reporters and cameramen
swept into the press screening, but my film crew and I weren’t allowed
past the door. As
former Director of the Glasgow Museums and author of five art books,
I’ve been welcomed into hundreds of galleries around the world, but a
feature I wrote for last week’s Mail on Sunday must have touched a nerve
with the Tate’s bosses and earned me a place on their blacklist.

Sinking feeling: Julian Spalding contemplates Hirst's shark in formaldehyde at the Tate Modern

I had dared to say what many of
my colleagues secretly think: Con Art, the so-called Conceptual Art
movement, is little more than a money-spinning con, rather like the
emperor’s new clothes. That goes for the ‘artist’ Carl Andre who sold a
stack of bricks for £2,297. It goes for Marcel Duchamp, whose old
‘urinal’ was bought by the Tate for $500,000 (about £300,000). It goes
for Tracey Emin’s grubby old bed. And, of course, it goes for Damien
Hirst. I was
determined to set aside my preconceptions and experience the Damien
Hirst retrospective, which opened on Wednesday and will close in
September. I’ve long believed him to be a money-hungry charlatan but as
the richest living artist at the age of 46, he must be doing something
right.

He was worth £215 million in
2010, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, and he pulls in visitor
numbers each day that many galleries would be lucky to draw in a month,
so surely I’ve been unfair.Yet
four hours later I emerged from the exhibition weary, miserable and
desperate to clear the lingering stench of rotten cow from my nose. Were
there not a Tate fatwa stamped on my head, I might have stood in front
of the hundreds still queuing to pay the £14 admission and shouted:
‘Stop.’ Of course,
people should decide for themselves. But judging by the surly
expressions of those dripping out, I wasn’t the only one left feeling
drained – and conned. In
a series of conversations, I found out what propels people, many of
whom rarely visit art galleries, to queue for 60 minutes for this
marketing circus. ‘Is it art?’ I asked and pointed at a shark preserved
in formaldehyde, a wall of dots, and flies feasting on a dead cow’s
head.

Defining work: The artist with Mother and Child
Divided, which comprises a cow and a calf cut in half and preserved in
formaldehyde. The work is part of the Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate
Modern, London, which runs from April 5 to September 9

‘Of course it is, it’s a Damien
Hirst.’ One plummy-voiced blonde accompanied by a gaggle of children
looked offended that I’d dared to ask. But why is it art? ‘Because it
makes you feel something.’ When I asked what it makes them feel, most
referred me to the guidebook explanations.What
quickly becomes apparent is that it is like a religion. Everyone is
strangely committed to the cult of Hirst – but few can articulate what
is fantastic about a soggy, sad-looking shark, preserved in a vitrine
with all the menace of a sagging sofa. Created
by a Turner Prize winning artist, the dead tiger shark, grandly named
The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living,
should be one of the great artworks of the last century, yet most
visitors spent less than three seconds looking at it. What
is also striking is the way disoriented visitors drift around the
gallery. Traditionally, in exhibitions of ‘real art’, visitors cluster
around the paintings or sculptures while the rest of the gallery is
empty. The Hirst
exhibition is another matter. People mill about like unmagnetised iron
filings. Why? Nobody is engaged. One enormous spot painting is half
hidden behind a formaldehyde-preserved cow.Smaller
vitrines containing skulls are dumped on the floor at random. A young
boy trips over one and stops to look at it. ‘Why are you looking at
that? It’s revolting,’ I say. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ the boy’s mother replies. ‘I have strange children.’In
fact, the only exhibit in the main exhibition (for the diamond skull is
shown separately) drawing a large crowd is a cordoned-off room called
In And Out Of Love, which contains exotic butterflies and bowls of
fruit. Nobody in the 40-deep queue looks at the spot paintings on the
nearby wall or the Ikea-style desk with an overflowing ashtray on it.

'Is it art?': Hirst's 1986 piece Spot Painting,
household gloss on board. Julian Spalding says those he spoke to
struggled to explain what was so special about the works on show

Thirty minutes later, we reach
the front, and are granted two minutes’ access to a small humid room of
butterflies, a lot less impressive than the Butterfly House at Berkeley
Castle – which costs only £3.50 to visit.This
confusion begins in the first room. Few people notice the first
exhibit, Kitchen Cupboard, a shiny orange Formica unit made in 1987. ‘Is
it a fire extinguisher case or part of the show?’ asks one baffled man.
Nobody answers because nobody else is looking at it. Few
pause at the grubby spot painting leaning carelessly against a wall.
Worse, the glass case containing a string of limp sausages,
imaginatively entitled ‘Sausages’, is held together with grubby gaffer
tape. Whoever was
responsible for refreshing the paintings with butterflies didn’t notice
that a butterfly’s abdomen has fallen away and the wings disintegrated. One
of the only exhibits to sustain visitors’ attention for more than a
couple of seconds is a grotesque black-and-white photograph taken in
1981. In it, Hirst grins and holds up a severed head with an uncanny
resemblance to Sir Winston Churchill. Back then, Hirst was a sixth-form
student. He scored an E-grade in A-level art and later wormed his way on
to the Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, University of London, after first
being rejected. Tellingly, the Tate has excluded Hirst’s paintings.
Quite simply, Hirst can’t paint. It
was at Goldsmiths that he met Charles Saatchi, who would propel him
from chancer to millionaire before they parted company in 2003 after a
disagreement over the way Hirst’s works were staged at Saatchi’s
gallery. Around that
time, Hirst admitted: ‘I can’t wait to get into a position to make
really bad art and get away with it.’ Which raises the question: is he
consciously playing us for fools?

I put this to an accountant from
Norwich, who was gazing intently at a wall of preserved fish that could
have been plucked from the Natural History Museum. ‘I like the fact that
Hirst put the skinned animal skulls next to the fish, which have skin,’
says Giles Kerkham. When I inform him that Hirst has amassed £215 million from such juxtapositions, he concedes, ‘No one’s worth that.’ ‘Think
of all the hungry people in the world you could feed with that,’ says
teaching assistant Kathryn Gynn as we stand in front of For The Love Of
God, a skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds that was reportedly sold for
£50 million. But it is
the rotting cow head, called A Thousand Years, that I can’t bear to
look at. Blood trickles out of it, swarms of flies feast on it and the
horrific stench is pumped into the gallery. ‘It’s very macabre,’ says
Craig Thurlby. What an understatement. ‘I interpret the flies and cow as
life and death, so I guess it has meaning and stuff,’ says Craig. ‘Isn’t Hirst just playing us for fools?’ I explode. ‘Probably,’ agrees Craig. ‘If he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.’Standing
next to him, two young men shake their heads. ‘I don’t like any of it,’
one says. So why did they come? ‘We just wanted to see what everyone’s
raving about.’ The same goes for a Moroccan tourist who hadn’t heard of Hirst until today. His reaction? ‘It’s not very nice.’I bump into the same two young men at the sausages. ‘What’s Hirst’s meaning?’ I ask them. ‘Maybe he was hungry.’ I can’t imagine a more accurate answer. One
wonders why Hirst even agreed to be shown in the Tate. After all, in an
interview in 1996, he said: ‘Museums are for dead artists. I’d never
show my work in the Tate.’ Dead
artists, indeed. For Hirst’s most loyal cult followers might champion
this exhibition as his mid-career celebration, but the shrewder ones can
see through his nonsensical cons. They see the truth: that Hirst, at
46, has reached the realms of dead artists. And this exhibition is his
grubby, inglorious obituary.

Julian
Spalding is an independent curator and museums consultant. His book Con
Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can is
available via Amazon Kindle.

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welcome to my life

Being a painter is not a choice. It is not a chosen
profession. Painting is a compulsion. It is a need like breathing or eating. If
fact it regularly supersedes both. There is no choice in whether or not I will
paint only the when and often not even that. Away from the studio I think about
the canvas that sits there unfinished, calling to me, challenging me, maddening
me.